Over recent years it has become commonplace for a business to provide the ability for a user to purchase goods from the business using a computer which communicates with a computer of the business. For example a business may provide a web site on the Internet which enables a user to purchase goods from the business over the World Wide Web. Following on from this success it has become a is requirement to more easily locate suitable businesses to deal with and this requirement has been satisfied by the arrival of registry services, such as specified by UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), which provide support for business entities which provide services.
A UDDI registry enables a business entity to publish information about the services it provides and a user to discover information about published business services. Accordingly, for example, a user can send a request to the UDDI registry to obtain details of business services which provide a particular service which the user requires. The user then chooses from one or more business services for which details are returned by the UDDI registry and the sends an appropriate request to the chosen business service. However the UDDI registry may return to a user details of a business service which it does not have appropriate permission to access and, as a result, the user will not discover that they cannot access a particular business service until their request to the particular business service is rejected.
This is a waste of time and resource for the user in making a request to a business service which is bound to fail, and a waste of time and resource for the business which provides the service which must handle requests from users which do not have the required permissions to access it. As a result it would be advantageous to provide a method of saving such waste time and resource.